History of Body modification and Piercing

Introduction

Body modification is defined as the (semi-) permanent, deliberate alteration of the human body and embraces procedures such as tattooing and body piercing (Featherstone, 1999).

Those practices have along history and are well known from various cultures in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania (Rubin, 1988).



There is also evidence for the prevalence of tattoos in Europe, dating back over 5000 years (Caplan, 2000;
Dorfer & Moser, 1998). Although the appearance of tattoos and body piercings varied geographically, they
always possessed a very specific meaning for the particular culture. Piercings were often used in
initiation rites, assigning their bearer to a certain social or age group (Gritton, 1988; Jonaitis, 1988), whereas
tattoos were utilized to signal religious affiliations, strength or social status (Gathercole, 1988; Gilbert, 2001; Schildkrout, 2004). In Europe, the practice of tattooing was predominant among sailors and other working class members from the beginning of the 20th century onwards (Sanders, 1989). Later on, tattoos
assigned affiliations to certain groups, such as bikers or inmates (DeMello, 1993, 1995). In the 1980s the punk and the gay movement picked up invasive body modification, mainly as a protest against the conservative middle class norms of society (Pitts, 2003). Until the 1990s, body modifications remained a
provocative part of various subcultures (DeMello, 2000; Pitts, 2003).
         In the last decade tattoos and piercings have increased tremendously in popularity, rising not only in numbers but also involving a broader range of social classes (DeMello, 2000; Sanders, 1989). The main cause of this extension can probably be found in cultural commercialism spread by the media and it comes along with a considerable alteration in signalling function such that body modification does not necessarily assign the bearer to a certain subculture anymore (Pitts, 2003; Turner, 1999;Wohlrab, Stahl, Rammsayer, & Kappeler, 2006). Many authors argued that tattoos and body piercings today ‘‘are nothing more than fashion accessories’’ (Craik, 1994; Turner, 1999), whereas others assigned them a deeper psychological meaning. Sweetman (1999) claimed that the permanence, the pain involved as well as the considerable amount of time needed for planning and after-care, especially for tattoos, impose a greater value to them than being simple accessories. Others suggested that body modification might enable traumatized individuals to handle personal experiences (Atkinson & Young, 2001; Carroll & Anderson, 2002). Generally, many authors ascribed a communicative character to body modifications (e.g., Atkinson, 2004; Stirn, 2004a, 2004b).
What people valued most about their own body modifications was ‘‘being different’’, so tattoos, in particular, can resemble attempts to accentuate one’s sense of self-identity (Atkinson & Young, 2001;
  
Sweetman, 1999) as well as ‘‘ to attain mastery and control over the body’’ (Carroll & Anderson, 2002).
Atkinson (2002) explored the meaning of tattoos specifically from women’s perspective and found that
female tattoos have various functions, including cultural rebellion but also personal reclamation and selfdefinition. Hence, motivations for the acquisition of tattoos and body piercings seem to be variable.
           Motivational investigations are important to provide a basis for understanding why people modify
their bodies and simultaneously contribute to the elimination of the outdated negative stigmatization of
body modifications. The body of the available literature of more recent dates points towards a change in attitude regarding body modification (Millner & Eichold, 2001; Schildkrout, 2004; Stirn, 2003a, 2004a, 2004b), and several studies of various disciplines address motivational aspects of tattooing and body piercing. Most studies chose an explorative approach when examining motivations; only some proposed larger motivational clusters (Atkinson & Young, 2001; Greif, Hewitt, & Armstrong, 1999; Stirn, 2004a). With this review, we aim to summarize and structure the large body of available literature on motivations for the acquisition of tattoos and body piercings. Because many motivations seem to be used in various  hrasings, we provide a broad description of motivations from the literature and establish general motivational categories for reference in future research.
                Tattoos and piercings are generally treated as two different aspects in this review. However, we found that motivations for obtaining both forms of body modification are quite similar – when viewed on a broad scale. Thus, to provide a clear structure in this review, motivational categories for the two practices have identical headlines and are considered the same. Nevertheless, we want to emphasize that detailed
motivational aspects, especially concerning the relevance and peculiarity of the specific motivational
categories, might differ enormously between tattoos and piercings.